


Ten Cents a Dance

by toli-a (togina)



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: 1940s, Angst, M/M, Stark Expo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-28
Updated: 2016-05-28
Packaged: 2018-07-24 07:06:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,750
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7498788
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/togina/pseuds/toli-a
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are gold stars in windows all over Brooklyn, by the time Bucky leaves. It's his last night - but there's no distracting Steve from the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ten Cents a Dance

**Author's Note:**

> More or less stolen from the MCU scene at the Stark Expo. Reposted from tumblr. Blue stars (on little flags) were hung in the windows of families who had a soldier fighting in the war, replaced with a gold star if the soldier died. The title is stolen from "Ten Cents a Dance," sung by a variety of women including Ella Fitzgerald, but probably most famously sung by Doris Day in a 1955 film.

When Bucky turns around, Steve isn’t there. Which doesn’t make any sense - half the reason Bucky dragged the girls to the Expo and not the dance hall was because he knew how Steve loved science fiction, the idea of a world filled with technological gewgaws and a chicken in everyone’s fancy pot.

Well, Steve had _learned_ to love it, after Bucky spent years bringing Stapledon and Burroughs and Campbell to read out loud when Steve was too ill to squint out the words on his own.

Steve should be right next to him, intent on the colors and lights and the catastrophe that seems to be Howard Stark, his thin face glowing blue under the fireworks. Then Bucky sees the recruitment center.

The Army pays him to aim a rifle, but Steve has been in his sight lines for years. Too bad they aren’t paying him to locate Steven G. Rogers in a crowd. Or an alley. Or in a trash can, after another lost fight.

“You’re kind of missing the point,” Bucky tells him, coming down too hard on Steve’s shoulder to spin him around. The point of a double date was that Steve would be there on Bucky’s last night in Brooklyn. That Bucky could steal a few more hours from the day, pretending that they would go home and crawl outside to escape the heat, sleeping in their skivvies on the roof. That they would be Steve and Bucky, and he wouldn’t have to be Sergeant James Barnes.

He didn’t choose the Army, didn’t choose any of this, but Steve chooses the fight everyday, puts it before everything and everyone. It’s Bucky’s job to pull Steve out again - and it’s all right, the draft, because it’s Bucky’s job to finish the fights Steve chooses to begin.

“I’ll catch up, " Steve says, though he looks more interested in catching up to Bucky's unit than to his date. Steve keeps talking, chest puffed out and still stretching to keep his face high enough to fit the uniform that they packed Bucky into that morning, like so much meat on the butcher’s hook.

When Steve’s mother died, they buried her in her Sunday dress, the flowers she’d embroidered on the collar bright against the cold pallor of her skin. Bucky’s uniform cinches tight around his waist, his throat, digs into the pulse on his wrists. He wonders if they will bother to wrap him in it, when they scatter Europe over his remains.

Steve doesn’t understand. He thinks that joining the Army is like knocking over pins with a baseball on the midway, the way Bucky did years ago to win him a teddy bear. Steve hadn’t asked for the bear, but he’d already been sick three times that year, missed so much school that they wanted him to repeat third grade. It had been his birthday. It had been his birthday, when they shipped Bucky off to train for a war Steve hadn’t asked him to win.

“Or worse, they’ll actually take you.” Last year twenty boys on their block shipped out. Father O'Malley’s said mass for five of them. Steve cleans and shops for the Kirchners across the hall, because Freddie Kirchner’s Ma doesn’t do a damn thing any more, only sits by the window with the gold star and cries.

Bucky’s father only talked about the war when he was roaring drunk - but he always was, by the time he stumbled home - and at night Bucky closes his eyes and sees Steve’s pale skin coated with mud from the trenches, his palms shredded by barbed wire. Rats run over his slender, bony feet, and when his wheezing wakes Bucky it is because Steve is choking on mustard gas and not the detritus of his own lungs.

“Look,” Steve says, his shoulders hunched the way Bucky’s tried to tell him not to do when he fights. “I know you don’t think I can do this.”

Steve has fought asthma and fever and flu and Sister Mary Margaret when she tried to cane Bucky for stealing all the iodine out of her office. He would go to Japan and take on the emperor himself, shoulders up and fists out instead of protecting his face like he should.

“This isn’t a back alley, Steve.” Bucky has memorized every alley in Brooklyn. His officers congratulated him on his hearing, his sharp eyes, his ability to stay perfectly still and listen without taking a breath. He can hear the sound of a fist hitting Steve Rogers’s chin over the bustle of the market on a weekend. He can find Steve in any alley, but if the Army takes Steve he will never see that bright grin and crooked spine again. “It’s a war.”

“I _know_ it’s a war.”

The war killed Steve’s Da fast where it took George Barnes years to catch up. Steve sees war in the pictures, in the papers, and doesn’t realize that war is an unshaven man with illegal booze on his breath and years of distance in his eyes.

“Then why are you so keen to fight?” Bucky might as well ask why Steve’s eyes are bluer than the stars in the windows - the star Steve has on their table, the one Bucky’s mother threw away. Steve says he won’t hang it until he watches the ship sail over the horizon. Until Bucky’s just a waving memory, farther away than he’s ever been in their lives. Steve hides the star under his sketchbook, draws himself in uniform, wears Bucky’s jacket arguing that he needs to test the fit - he might be keen to fight, but Steve will burn breakfast, wheeze himself into an asthma attack and slow them down tomorrow when it means watching Bucky go.

“ _Bucky_.” He sticks out his chin, Adam’s apple jutting over the edge of his shirt. Bucky had knotted the tie as they stood in front of their cloudy mirror, his cheek pressed to Steve’s hair as his fingers brushed the length of Steve’s throat. “There are men laying down their lives. I got no right to do any less than them. That’s what you don’t understand - this isn’t about me.”

Bucky is standing in front of Steve, already decked out in his Sunday best. He is dancing at his own wake; he is buying the popcorn for the rockets that will be his last show.

Steve has said all this to Bucky since Pearl Harbor. Keeps saying it, because if he hides the blue star under his notebook and wedges the uniform under the couch they can both believe that men marching off to their graves isn’t something Bucky understands.

“Right.” Bucky’s fingernails dig into his palms, can't help curling his hands into fists. It is his last night, and Steve - Steve will always put the fight first. "Because you’ve got nothing to prove," he hisses, but Steve doesn't even flinch.

"Sarge?” Gertie calls, pink-cheeked and eager for a night on the town. Bucky didn’t ask for the Army. Didn’t ask for Gertie, though he did ask if she had a friend, to make the evening big enough for Steve.

He should have known that nothing in Brooklyn - not even a flying car, or a uniform sewn over his best friend - would be big enough for Steve, when Steve wants a war. He doesn’t ask Steve to come, because Bucky does not enlist for fights he knows he cannot win.

He waits to be drafted, instead.

“Don’t do anything stupid until I get back.” If he walks away now, Steve will have to stop acting like a fool, lovestruck with the Front. Or he will go on being Steve Rogers, from Jersey or Philly or Ohio, but at least Bucky won't be there to watch.

“How can I?” Steve’s voice follows him, winds over boardwalks and down streets and onto the roof when Bucky’s home late, when it’s too hot to eat inside and they’ve cooled the cans of beer in Mrs. Murphy’s fridge, press cold metal to sweaty skin before popping the tabs. Bucky wonders how long it will take - how many miles of ocean and days on the march - to make him a soldier and not a man hopelessly focused on an Irish temper housed in a scrawny frame. “You’re taking all the stupid with you,” Steve adds, the first hint of a truce where Steve will never apologize or retreat.

It is Bucky who steps forward, who surrenders, because Steve is already where he wants to be. “You’re a punk,” he says, Steve’s shoulders relaxed in Bucky’s embrace, his answering grip tight. Tighter than Steve would admit to, his bony fingers digging into the jacket he had shoved under the bed when Bucky first wore it home, had hidden the jacket and buried his face in the pillow until the tears were only because he couldn’t breathe.

“Jerk,” Steve replies, breath brushing warm over Bucky’s ear. “Be careful.” Steve lets go first, because he has a fight to join. Because he can tilt his head up, keep his eyes on Bucky’s face and away from the uniform with his best friend packed inside. “Don’t win the war ‘til I get there.”

_Men are laying down their lives._ You _don’t understand._

Bucky salutes. The gladiators always bowed to the crowd baying for a fight.

Steve drew Bucky’s uniform as a rumpled, pinstriped suit; he hid the blue star under their running tally of the month’s bills and his newest comic book. If Bucky takes off his hat Steve can pretend it's any other summer night, that Bucky won’t join the fight until he hears Steve has already begun.

If Steve keeps Bucky out of his uniform, if he hides the blue star so that he does not think of Mrs. Kirchner sobbing as she switched her family's blue star for gold, if he races into the recruitment center and joins the fight - then they are only saying good night.

Bucky salutes, because he is wearing his Sunday best and Father O'Malley has his name in the weekly prayers. War is whiskey on a man’s breath and men laying down their lives and Freddie Kirchner wasn’t even twenty when the Japs gunned him down.

He salutes, because Steve won’t come to the docks tomorrow - he will elbow Bucky in the ribs and burn his eggs and see him out the door to the factory where Bucky gave notice months before - and _be careful_ will have to stand in for good-bye.


End file.
